To me RPG is a learning instrument that puts one in a situation, and then one has to find a solution (i.e. “play a role”). Each possible solution chosen has consequences.

So to me RPG is

Scenario.

Choice.

Consequence.

However, nowadays RPG seems to mean mostly “character-creation and development”, which removes almost all choice and consequence as it's “limiting and punishing“. I think nowadays RPG is mostly a form of daydreaming used to relax.

To me RPG is a learning instrument that puts one in a situation, and then one has to find a solution (i.e. “play a role”). Each possible solution chosen has consequences.

So to me RPG is

Scenario.

Choice.

Consequence.

However, nowadays RPG seems to mean mostly “character-creation and development”, which removes almost all choice and consequence as it's “limiting and punishing“. I think nowadays RPG is mostly a form of daydreaming used to relax.

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As I had said previously, there are lots of games that don't label themselves as RPG's that do everything you talked about currently.

There are a lot of folks out there who associate RPG elements like leveling up and stat changes/character builds as something synonymous with the RPG experience. You can forgive this kind of ignorance usually, but it can be overwhelming. The casual player tends to see the RPG as a sandwich. You're free to open it up and see the meat, greens and condements that make up the meal. No surprises. What you is what you get. I like to imagine the RPG as a broth. You can't just take a glance through the murky surface. You have to dig in there and identify each ingredient by yourself. Now, say the sandwich and the broth both have carrots. The carrots are the RPG elements. Both dishes share the carrot but the sandwich is not broth and vice versa.

A roleplaying game to me is a game in which it gives you the tools to define a character of your choosing, or give you a character that is established but you get to decide what that character is, and then have the game react to those definitions you set up for it.

What are my characters morals? Can they be defined?
What is my characters personality? Can it be defined?
What are the strengths and shortcomings of my character? Can they be define?
What is my characters relationship with the world around him/her/it? Can it be defined?

And of course, will the world, quests, dialogue, characters and events react to those definitions.

Branching dialogue where your character get to say more than just asking questions.
Skills that offer varied and noticeably different playstyles and will actively lock you out of content if you do not meet the criteria.
Primary stats that determine just how successful your character are at using the skills and have an impact outside of the skills as well.
Quests with multiple solutions to give you as much of a choice in how to define the characters moral compass as possible.
Morality, personality, strengths and weaknesses and relations with the world around you.

Those are key ingredients for a roleplaying experience to me.

Any roleplaying game where the definitions of your character has to be solely in your headcanon and make believe playstyle is not an RPG to me.
Skyrim being a good example of this.

And just cause a game offers choices and branches in its narrative does not mean it is an RPG to me.
Witcher 3 being a good example of this, as well as any Telltale Game.

What is roleplaying?
To me it is to step into the shoes of a role different than yours and being able to step into another pair of shoes for someone completely different the 2nd time around.
To go from a cocky gangbanger who's looking for the next big score just to feed a drug habit to a meek wandering unlicensed doctor that can't help but butt his nose into things in a desperate attempt to get hired full time. That's important in an RPG.

In a few sentences? An excel sheet. And if it's integrated into gameplay and becomes an important part of it at all. CQC or cool story fluff that lets you decide what to do next is fluff. A still cool and necessary modern trend but still a trend.

If you look into the first computer RPG, most were dungeon crawlers and rogue-like.
In the Interplay era, it meant something storywise. You are part of the story and your choices provide changes in the plots.
In AAA game industry, having a couple of stats is enough to be called an RPG. Hell, a lot of people consider Borderlands or Diablo to be RPG.

There a website called RPG Codex, that provide awesome reviews and are a goldmine of informations. The RPG purist gather there... And they never agree about what is an RPG.

I would say that we still do have a metric, being the board table rpg. Those game usually have quite some emphasis on the interaction between the players and the gamemaster. The agency is kind of going back and forth between the gamemaster plans and the players wims. A good gamemaster knows how to include players input while making a plot that everyone find enjoyable. If the gamemaster is too controlling, the players might feel like they are not involved. If the gamemaster leave the players do everything they want, the overall experience might end up being less cohesive and memorable. And some board table RPG don't even have stats.

So i guess Interplay is close, but we shall not forget decades of dungeon crawlers and roguelike being labelled as RPG.

Also, being geographically open-ended isn't necessary mandatory. Imo, the shadowrun games fit, for instance. There are a lot of RPG cessions in which you don'T have a choice about which dungeon to explore or which mission to take. It is how you handle them that matters.

So the thing I'm getting at is that some games I've played can be classified as role playing games but aren't going for it.

Civilization IV is a game where you can play as any historical leader you want of it. All of them have traits that shape the gameplay and you have multiple ways to complete a game of it. The game also responds to your actions with the AI leaders growing to hate or like you. You actually have random events where you can approach random situations in multiple ways and have a system of XP for units of it.

I think you could call CIV a RPG, it is basically role-playing a leader or nation.

Just because the game doesn't call that itself may be irrelevant, at least, as far as definition goes.

The one thing that keeps coming to my mind is that „scenario“ is more important than „character“. And a character is defined by its actions. But most importantly is consequence. How much they shape the character, and the follow up scenarios, or how much influence they have. I think the impact or weight of "consequence" is significant.

An area in which CIV may be lacking is that there is not enough consequence for the player other than win/lose.

Another aspect of role playing that shouldn't be overlooked is that it's also used by organizations like fireworkers or the military. You can create a scenario like „house on fire, three people inside, what are you going to do?“ then the pupils make their choices, and the instructor informs them that „the people died, they died, or the people are save“. And that is role-playing.

If going very far, every game is technically role-playing, aka a simulation of something without running a risk. Two children playing shopping is role-playing.

I think it is just important to remember that "role" is not so much "character" as it is "scenario".

However, each point can be detailed and evolved, asking which element (scenario, choice, consequence) is the most important one, and in which way.

Is chess a RPG? It's two armies, they make moves and the consequence is losing pieces and eventually victory/defeat. Is that role-playing an army/general? Or is it missing something, like having not enough scenario and/or not enough consequence?

what i would define as an "rpg" is a game which allows you to fill in (play) a role. usually a rpg is defined by the player-able character then the plot itself. even an rpg with a 'defined main character' (like witcher) has the player fill in that characters role with their own. rpgs are about what the player can do 2 affect the world the player inhabits rather then what the game world would do to the character (this is my dumbass opinion)

This is wrong. The game labels itself a Strategy game, not a Real Time Strategy game. And it is obvious a 4x Strategy game (it's not even real time, it is a turn game).

Now, what I usually see people doing when saying what a gaming genre is (in particular RPGs), is that they make the mistake of taking elements from genres and start spreading them around. A genre (and this goes for everything, from literature, music, cinema, painting, sculpture, architecture, games, etc), is defined by the full "package" that wraps the final product. Not by individual elements.

It is possible to have individual elements from one genre (or more) in a product, and then the final product is not of that same genre. For example, why is a song considered Hard Rock instead of Heavy Metal even if they use many of the same instruments? Why isn't a Horror movie a Comedy, even if there is a character in that movie that cracks a few jokes? Why isn't a Fauvist painting, Expressionism instead? And the examples can go on and on.

Since I wrote so many times what makes a RPG a RPG in the past, I will just do what I usually do these days and copy most of the stuff I already said...

Disclaimer: Do not open this spoiler tag unless you have a lot of time and patience to read the wall of text contained in "Quote blocks". You've been warned.

The whole thing about a game being a RPG is that the characters controlled by the player mainly use their own capabilities to deal with the world and achieve/fail things. If the player controls and does everything that the character should be doing, it stops being a RPG.

I once again see people confusing the gaming genre RPG with the term "role-play". They are two different things. In the genre you decide what your character(s) do, but they have to do it themselves, in the term, you pretend and act like your character. They are two very different things. That is why there are P&P/TT RPG and then there is a different kind of genre called LARP, because in the first, you control characters and decide what they do, but they have to do it themselves using their abilities, in the other, while you still have characters with abilities, the focus is on how you pretend your character does things (many times it even overwrites your character abilities).

No amount of squirming or yelling changes that. We have many genres in gaming, and there are genres that already include what people are saying about "what a modern RPG should be". Those are Action, Adventure, Shooter, Simulation, etc.

People these days like to say that RPG is a game where someone can assume one or several roles in a game. But that is just bullshit. You assume a role in pretty much 100% of the games these days. Other games allow to assume several roles. For example, games like Team Fortress, you have classes and each have a particular role. By that definition Team Fortress games are RPGs and not Shooters. Other games like Metal Gear Solid V give your character the choice of what he can do or focus on doing, Snake can be a stealth expert that specializes in infiltration and espionage, he can focus on being a cowboy, riding on his horse using pistols, he can focus on using artillery and blow things up, he can focus on relying on support from base using his helicopter and supplies, he can focus on collecting weaponry and vehicles from the battlefield, he can focus on disarming mines in war zones, saving and extracting soldiers, destroying enemy heavy troops and armored vehicles, and so on... Is Metal Gear Solid V a RPG, no, it is an Action Adventure game.

Now why aren't those games and many others like them RPGs? Because gaming has many genres and they are from those genres. I don't understand the obsession people have these days with trying to cram games into the RPG genre. It is like there are no other genres or that RPG is the king of genres, so any game has to be a RPG.
You have inventory? Then you're a RPG. You have experience points? Then you are a RPG. You have level up or upgrades? Then you are a RPG. You have quests? Then you are a RPG. You have dialogue? Then you are a RPG... Never mind that RPGs don't need any of the previous things, if a game today has any of those, it becomes a RPG, it's just like magic.

I have wrote in this forum so many times about this that I should just start quoting all my previous posts instead of typing more stuff... Here is one of my past posts about what is a RPG:

First roleplaying game was Dungeons and Dragons (Pen and Paper) and so we can see what a roleplaying game is by looking at how it worked.
Then we can see through history what other RPGs share in common with the first and we can define what a RPG is by seeing what all of those games share in common. And no, controlling a character, leveling said character up or do quests are not the only things that make a RPG. Pretty much 99% of games have you controlling a character in some way, today most games have some kind of leveling up and/or quests, but that does not make a RPG, those are elements that were first encountered in roleplaying games, but are not what made that genre being a specific genre.
We also need to deconstruct all of the RPG genres too, because RPG has subgenres:

cRPG

Action RPG

Tactical RPG

jRPG

Why are these genres also RPGs? Because all RPGs have the same base element:
-The character or characters you roleplay use their own skills, strengths, abilities, weaknesses, and faults to interact with anything in the world. A RPG uses the character to interact with the game world, not the player. That is the fundamental rule of what a RPG is. From P&P to cRPG, Action RPG, Tactical RPG, jRPG, etc, It is always what they all have in common.
Your character(s) have stats and values and those are used in everything (usually using some kind of "dice roll" or RNG), from hitting the enemies to convincing someone that a lie is truth, from unlocking a locked door to sneak past enemies, etc.

People say that what is important in a RPG is good choices and story, a good and reactive world, believable characters, good combat system, action, dialogue, and whatever else people prefer, but that is still not what a RPG is. That is all what makes a good RPG for each of us, not what makes a RPG.

For example World of Darkness RPG system didn't have character levels, characters do not level up. World of Darkness is a RPG and has one of my favorite RPG systems ever (it is the same used in Vampire the Masquerade cRPGs too). So leveling up is not what a RPG is.
For example people say that a RPG needs quests. But quests are just objectives, and pretty much most games have objectives in one way or another. Quests are not what makes a RPG.
Etc.

Those things are not what makes the RPG genre but what enriches it instead.

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If you remove the character being the one doing things instead of the player, you totally removed what makes a RPG a RPG. It stops being a RPG right away, because that is the fundamental system/mechanics that make the RPG genre.

If you imagine any RPG ever made (including any sub-genre) for consoles and computers and remove from those games all the stats, skills, perks, attributes, and any other similar thing. You end up with a totally different game genre that already exists.
Do that to the classic Fallout games and you would end up with a game that can be considered a bullet-hell-lite or isometric shooter with dialogue. Do that to Daggerfall and you have a FP Action game. Do that to Fallout 3 or FNV and you have a FP/TP Shooter. Do that to Planescape:Torment and you have a Isometric Interactive Novel .
Why is that? Because without that system/mechanics, the games stop being a RPG. It's as clear as night and day.

Second, the book opens with an article on how "TRUE RPGS" never really existed. It's a genre that represents a lot of things to lot of people. To some (like you) it means stats-driven gameplay, but to more modern players it means choices. Josh Sawyer once wrote how Wizardry probably wouldn't be an RPG by today's standards. Stats barely matter in Mass Effect 3, but good luck convincing anyone that it isn't a RPG.

FFS, I even wrote a massive article on Gamasutra just talking about why RPGs are so hard to define because of the various sources from which it evolved.

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If true RPGs never existed, then it wouldn't be a genre.
You had linked me to that article on Gamasutra a couple of years ago already. And as most people, it commits the same mistake. It takes elements from games to describe RPGs instead of taking the whole package. Like I mentioned before in this thread, RPGs use elements that are also found in many other genres but it is how those elements work in the full package (entirety of the game) that defines a genre. If we starts saying that a game genre is defined by each element it uses, we wouldn't have game genres anymore... Like the example I also mentioned before, platformers use the jump element, does any game with a jump element becomes a Plaformer? No, it doesn't. Does a Shooter without the jumping element stops being a shooter (because other shooters have jumping)? No, it doesn't. That is what people are trying to do with RPGs. (Simplification example ensues) Some RPGs allow role-playing, so RPGs have to allow roleplaying... But wait, some don't allow role-playing oh no, what is a RPG is complicated... Which is always missing the point.

RPGs just like all the other genres are the sum of all it's parts, but the key thing is that the character skills and stats are always more important than the player skills.

Your article talks about what different people think RPGs are, but I mentioned in the past that what people consider a RPG is different from what a RPG actually is. Because people are using their own preferences to say what a RPG should be for them. They are using elements that enrich the RPG genre to define that genre. But again, if we strip it down to the bare bones, those elements are not present on many RPGs.
The thing about character skills matter more than player skill is present in every RPG subgenre since the first. There are RPGs that don't have story, there are RPGs without choices, there are RPGs without level up, there are RPGs without role-playing. No matter what one prefers in their RPGs, this does not change.

Also you mention in your article that Action RPGs are dependent of player skill more than character skill, but this is false. Grab the most influential Action RPGs from history and you will see that they depend more on character skill than player skill. Diablo, Titan Quest, Daggerfall, Ultima Underworld, etc. depend on the character skills to hit and deal damage to the enemies. The player presses the attack button and the characters have to be able to do it themselves.
You also mention that Zelda games are not RPGs and that is true, at least for the older games (I don't know about recent Zelda games, since i haven't played them and don't know much about them to be honest).

The thing about saying that RPGs are games that allow the player to play a role, is totally silly. Probably 90% of every computer game has the player playing the role of the character. Doom has the player playing the role of a marine, Duke Nukem the player plays as Duke, Mario games have the player playing the role of Mario or Luigi (or even more characters), etc. If the capability of playing a role would be a defining element of RPGs, then most genres of games would be considered RPGs. Again, it's the full package that defines a genre, not each element. For example, Metal Gear games have the player playing a stealthy special forces agent Solid Snake, the games do a pretty good job of simulating that role, but they are not RPGs.
You quote Richard Garriott in your article:

This is my personal definition; most people don't adhere to this. Diablo, great game. Loved it. For me, I use the term "RPG" for it because it is a stats game. It's a "Do I have the best armor equipment compared to the creature I'm facing?" There's not really any story for it. It's a great challenge reward cycle game. Blizzard, by the way, does the best challenge reward cycle games I've seen.

On the other hand, Thief or Ultima are role-playing games versus RPG -- which I know stands for role-playing game. When I think of a role-playing game, it is now where you are charged with playing an actual role and qualitative aspects of how you play are every bit as important as what equipment you use. That's what I find most interesting. It's a lot easier to do stories there.

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Even he is differentiating between RPG and role-playing games. Just like I have been saying. There are RPGs but those do not need to have role-playing, and there are role-playing games (allow role-playing) without being RPGs. And that is what confuses people, they confuse role-playing in a game with RPGs. Like I said before, one can role-play in some Grand Strategy games, but that doesn't change the fact that they are Grand Strategy games and not RPGs, it also doesn't change the fact one can role-play in Metal Gear games, but they are not RPGs.
RPGs are games that follow the RPG genre/formula. It is the full package (just like any genre of pretty much any creative work) as I keep mentioning. Role-playing can be achieved in most games you control a character, and even in games you don't control a character, like Uplink: Hacker Elite (where you don't control any character, but it still allows one to play the role of a hacker).

There are indeed several games that hybridize game genres. Spellforce, Warlords Battlecry and even Fallout New Vegas for example. These games offer the elements and wrap those elements in a full package that can both be RTS and RPG (first two game series mentioned), while Fallout New Vegas does the same with Shooter and RPG.

This is my personal definition; most people don't adhere to this. Diablo, great game. Loved it. For me, I use the term "RPG" for it because it is a stats game. It's a "Do I have the best armor equipment compared to the creature I'm facing?" There's not really any story for it. It's a great challenge reward cycle game. Blizzard, by the way, does the best challenge reward cycle games I've seen.

On the other hand, Thief or Ultima are role-playing games versus RPG -- which I know stands for role-playing game. When I think of a role-playing game, it is now where you are charged with playing an actual role and qualitative aspects of how you play are every bit as important as what equipment you use. That's what I find most interesting. It's a lot easier to do stories there.

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I already mentioned this in this post, but will do it again. Richard Garriott is actually saying the same thing I keep saying. RPGs are stats games and some allow role-playing, while there are other games that are not RPGs that also allow role-playing. Role-playing can happen in many game genres, not just in RPGs while there can be RPGs that do not allow role-playing. This is actually supporting what I have been saying since the beginning. It's right there, black on white .

Similarly, Tim Cain wrote in the book explaining why Star Control 2 is an RPG. So yeah, I don't care about random posters on the internet going "Game X isn't an RPG!". Much wiser and experienced people follow a broader, more interesting definition.

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And yet, what Tim Cain said doesn't conflict at all with what I say. It actually once again confirms what I keep saying... Skills are important for a game to be a RPG. Tim Cain is saying that RPGs need character skills (in this case something that works like skills in classic RPGs). So in his opinion if a game has those skills (even if they are not called skills, but work in a similar way as in RPGs) he considers it a RPG.

The ship is the character and it has it's own "skills" to deal with the game universe, player skill doesn't matter much because without having good "skills" your ship will not be able to achieve much in the game.

He also explains how the game contains other elements that can be present on other RPGs, so for him, this full package makes Star Control 2 a RPG. But the skills seem essential, since it is one of the three things what he focus when saying that for him Star Control 2 is a RPG:

You control a ship that starts off as a bare-bones hull, and as you acquire resources and credits, you can buy upgrades to improve your ship, as well as gain new crew and landing craft to replace any that were lost in battles and exploration. These features are a direct analog to the skills, items and hit points in a typical role-playing game, making Star Control 2 closer to a CRPG than an adventure game.

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Also notice how the remaining things he points out are things that make a good RPG for him, and not what makes a RPG:

And like any good CRPG, Star Control 2 offers three areas of activity for the player: exploration, storyline, and combat.

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So indeed, both Tim Cain and Richard Garriott say the same things as I do but in different ways .

No, Borderlands and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are not RPGs, no matter what you say, they are not RPGs and don't "technically qualifies". I also mentioned FNV as being a real hybrid of shooter and RPG. But anyone who played FNV, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Borderlands can tell the difference between them all. If you can't see why FNV is a hybrid and why the other two are shooters, then I can't manipulate your brain into realizing why that is, I will put a bit of effort into it on my next point though. Borderlands contain some elements commonly found in RPGs it is wrapped around a shooter and the end result of that is a shooter, it behaves like a shooter and not a RPG, it plays like a shooter and not a RPG it requires player skill for everything which RPGs do not, etc.

I will break it up to you. Answer me this:
Can you beat FNV without shooting a gun? Can you beat the game without using any player skill for stuff the character should be able to do (using the skills and stats)?
I will answer that myself. Yes you can. You can beat FNV only using character skills. The only things that make it a Shooter RPG hybrid is that you can beat the game only shooting people using your player skill for that (like a Shooter) and you can beat the game using only the character's skills (get companions and they can do the fighting for you, make a diplomat and you can convince and pass all the mandatory big battles without fighting, make a sneaky character or use stealthboy and you can avoid battles, invest in medicine and/or survival so your healing items heal much more and you can run away from any battle too, etc) and if you really want to actually fight, the game offers the option of using VATS, which relies on the character skills and stats to fight, while also giving a small bonus for those players that are not good at using their skills instead of the character's ones (all damage the character takes while in VATS is reduced) and offers a lot of options for players to make a VATS only character (Max AGL, good weapon skill, plenty of perks to make VATS more effective). Now tell me if you can beat STALKER and Borderlands in these two ways? Hmmm... it's like you can only do it by using player skill of aiming and shoot, you interact with every character in those games without using character skills, you fight in those games without using character skills either, it's all player skills... It's like as if the games are shooters after all... Because they are.

Borderlands' combat, for the umpteenth time, consists in debuffing enemies and buffing yourself with actives and passives, applying the correct element and depending on your build then, using different types of weapons or even melee to apply the finalising segment of the fight. The more complicated fights in the game play more like raid bosses in WoW and other MMORPGS. Hell, some DLC parts, the "Invincible" bosses and Digistruct Peak are very clearly Raids in formula. How is that combat not overtly reliant on its RPG elements, exactly?

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Because it still plays like any common FPS. You say it relies on debuff enemies and buff characters, but RPGs do not do rely on that, RPGs do not rely on raid formula either. Borderlands is a complex and quite good (specially in co-op) FPS and should be recognized for it on it's own merit. Labeling it as a RPG is just diminishing what the FPS genre can be.
All of those things do not make a FPS a RPG, it just makes a FPS more complex.
Also WoW and other MMORPGS still rely on Character skills more than player skill. Good luck trying to use a weapon you don't have the skill for, good luck opening locks without the lockpick skill, good luck making a potion without alchemy skill, good luck mining without the mining skill, etc.

Let me use yet a different way of showing what I mean:
Lets take the whole Borderlands 2 game, lets remove all the skill trees and buffs and debuffs (which for this mental exercise we will pretend are like RPG character skills) from it. Is it still "mechanically" playable (as in could you play it still like any other Shooter?)? Yes it is, it will be unbalanced as hell, it will be boring as hell but you can still play it and it is still a FPS (you can still collect weapons and you can still shoot those weapons and you can still kill enemies).
Now Remove the Shooter elements that rely on player skill for the character (player aiming, player shooting and player dodging) from it and you can't play it except talking to some NPCs. 99% of the game is now non-existant.
This is (once again) what I mean by Borderlands is a FPS and the elements that are also found in RPGs (even though they are found in many other genres too) are too "wrapped" in a FPS to change it's genre.

That is why Richard Garriott says that RPG is different from roleplaying game.

They are two different things. You can have role-playing in many game genres (including RPG genres), but that doesn't make all those games become RPGs.

Another game I just thought that is not a RPG but has so called "RPG elements": This War of Mine.

EDIT:
I just thought of applying the same example I used for Borderlands, in a past post, but this time for STALKER:
If you grab STALKER and remove the "RPG Elements". You still have a barebones FPS that is still mechanically playable. Same problem as Borderlands, it will be unbalanced as hell, it will be boring as hell, but it still plays like a FPS.
Now remove from STALKER all the "FPS elements" and you have no game.

Do that to a real Shooter RPG like FNV and if you remove the "RPG elements", you will cripple some of the dialogue that is based on character skills and stats but you will still have a bare bones FPS. Your weapons will deal base damage because there is no skills to increase that, your weapon's sway will always be the most possible, although crouching, using iron-sights and taking something like steady minimize that a lot (in case of using steady it removes sway completely for a time), and those are not "RPG elements", so you will still have them in the game anyway.

Remove the "FPS elements" from FNV and you will still have a RPG. Combat will be more boring and unballanced because you can't just use VATS continuously forever (you have to wait for AP to regenerate based on your AGL value) although you can still pick perks that speed that regen, and even fill some of the AP when you kill enemies. But in general you still have a pretty playable RPG.

This happens with the other hybrid game series I mentioned before. Warlords Battlecry and Spellforce.

Basically in those two series, the RPG in them are the "Heroes". They behave exactly like characters in many RPGs do, they have the stats and skills, they level up, they have inventory, they have abilities, etc. And they are implemented in the game exactly like they would be in a different RPG.

If you remove the heroes and replace them with any basic unit that does not have those "RPG elements" (basically you're removing all the "RPG elements" used in the game), the game still plays like a any RTS.

If you remove all the "RTS elements" from the games (base building, resource points gathering, unit spawning, army control, etc) the game still plays like any other Action RPG. You can control the hero and fight the enemies that are on the map, get items, do quests (that do not involve destroy enemy bases, because there are no bases anymore) level up, equip stuff, etc.

Those games are all real hybrids, and still work with and without each "genre elements".

See the difference when I say the elements matter only on how they are implemented and wrapped by the full game (full package).

Unfortunately genres can't be chosen just by feeling. For example, no one will call Jazz Rock n'Roll just because they feel like it is Rock n'Roll.
Genres aren't attributed by what those things have in common, why aren't Doom games Platformers even though you can jump into platforms? Why aren't FIFA games "Manager" Sport games even though you can assign tactics, and players to various positions, assign formation and even have some modes where you can form your own team with players from several teams? Why aren't Thief games First Person Shooters even though they are in first person and you can shoot enemies with different weapons? Why aren't Pokemon games Fighting games even though the main objective is using your characters to battle and fight other characters?

I like New Vegas, but it's not an RPG - it's the second best spinoff of an RPG.

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yeah new vegas is certainly a weird beast; it has a lot of gameplay features not prominent in good old fashion crgps like walking forever and shooting stuff; however you can't ignore the amount of roleplaying it provides, especially in terms of shaping your character morally and affecting the outcome of the game. There are so many different endings to the game its still blows my mind how Obsidian achieved that much complexity in only a year. So I think it deserves to be regarded as a successful rpg and it certainly holds up to the old games (although I still prefer F1&2).